Alternate Livelihood for fishery communities

Speculative Design

A Future Domestic Landscape

Duration

10 weeks, 2017, Umeå Institute of Design

Keywords

Speculative Design, Fictional Design, Critical Design

THE BRIEF

The brief was to Imagine domestic life in your home country soon from now. The project was an opportunity to speculate critically on various current weak signals in the society.

THE OUTCOME

The project presents a fictional future for the underprivileged female fishery communities living in the coastal region of India. It speculates the impact of climate change on their livelihoods, They become traders of ‘Climate action’ data, vending their generational understanding of dealing with the change.

THE IMPACT

The short film and the concept design was exhibited at Humlab-X, an interdisciplinary digital lab at Umeå University. At the public exhibition, visitors were asked to imagine what would they imagine inside the climate data packages.

PROJECT FOCUS

Fishery communities

Marginalised communities living in coastal region of southern India

Climate change

Global weak signals of the society as the strength of the project

Women's rights

Representation of women working within fishery and outside their community

Playing with constraint workshop— I organised workshop in which participants role played different character in a fictional coastal world and created objects to represent themselves.

Script draft — I iterated the storyline by doing test-readings with different people

Storyboarding - Early storyboard to communicate the story from a perspective of a fishing women character.

Video Stills - I created stills to communicate the story

The idea is great since locals have a much better knowledge and feeling about the ecosystem and its influences. I reckon the most exciting thing is, that these women are probably eager to contribute and they would be good at collecting data and taking responsibility. 

— PhD student at Department of Ecology, Environment and Geoscience, Umeå University

At the beginning of the speculative course, while I was doing desktop research, I came across a lot of critical design projects in the developed world where technological development is taken for granted.There were limited projects which explore fictional design for unprivileged people which suffer the most from the wicked problems of the world in the current settings. I decided to speculate for them in this course, showcasing their strengths. Through the design process, I decided to give a face to intangible data.

It was challenging but also fascinating for me to explore speculative design world, how writing (the Design Fiction, screenwriting) can be used as a tool to communicate a design concept, Especially when having to break down a complex context into a short story and one artefact.